ILPC 2026

When we use a product, a service, or even an algorithm that was brought into being with digital labour, there is no way to know whether an exhausted worker is behind it; whether they get laid off if they become sick or get pregnant; whether they are spending twenty hours a week just searching for work; how precarious their source of income is; or whether they are being paid an unfairly low wage. According to the World Bank, there are now 5 million digital workers that live all over the world: doing work that is outsourced via platforms or apps in the ‘gig economy.’ Lacking the ability to collectively bargain, workers have little ability to negotiate wages or working conditions with their employers who are often on the other side of the world. As part of an ongoing research project, we have assessed work processes and conditions in three types of gig economy platforms differentiated by the type of work involved: crowdwork platforms (highly commodified work where clients never interact directly with workers, for example, Mechanical Turk or Crowdflower), freelance platforms (platforms that facilitate a more direct relationship between client and worker, for example, Upwork or Freelancer), and location-based apps (i.e. apps requiring workers to be in a specific location, for example, Deliveroo, TaskRabbit, or Uber). The platforms present like digital black boxes, deliberately obscuring the labour processes involved. In order to address this, we have analysed the platforms ‘from below’, starting from the perspective of workers involved. This involved an ethnographic approach that develops the methodological tools and insights of sociology of work and labour geographies to refresh and updates these in an online context. Whereas traditionally researchers would be able to approach the factory gates (or office doors), these sites of encounter are now increasingly dispersed in an online space. The ease of starting work on these platforms – signified by their denotation as “gigs” – provides an opportunity to examine the labour process directly as an ethnographic participant. This initial round of data collection on each platform highlighted the keys issues and challenges that were further explored through two subsequent methods: online surveys and interviewing. To conclude, we outline a range of potential responses, including our own plans to develop a ‘Fairwork Foundation’: a project that sits at the intersections of strategies from worker/consumer alliances, and radical transparency.